Candide Discovers Parisian Society — Candide

Candide stays in Bordeaux only long enough to sell a few El Dorado pebbles and hire a chaise for two, because he will not travel without Martin. He leaves his sheep with the Academy of Sciences. That year's prize asks why the wool is red. A learned man of the North proves, by A plus B minus C divided by Z, that the sheep must be red and die of the rot. Every inn says, we go to Paris, so he makes the detour. He enters by the suburb of St. Marceau and fancies himself in the dirtiest village of Westphalia. A slight illness brings two physicians he never sent for, and two devotees to warm his broths, because the inn has seen a diamond and a heavy box. Martin remembers being poor and sick in Paris, with neither friends nor doctors, and recovering. Physic and bleeding make Candide worse. A parson asks for a bill for the other world payable to the bearer. The devotees call it the new fashion. Martin turns the priest out by the shoulders. There is scandal and a lawsuit. Candide gets well. At cards the ace never comes to him. Martin is not astonished.

A little Abbé of Perigord takes them in hand, one of those busybodies who watch for strangers and sell the town's scandals. At the theatre Candide weeps at well-acted scenes. A fashionable wit tells him his tears are misplaced: the actress is shocking, the actor worse, the play worse still, and the author does not know Arabic though the scene is in Arabia. France has five or six thousand dramas, says the Abbé, and fifteen or sixteen good ones. An actress who plays Queen Elizabeth reminds Candide of Cunegonde. In the provinces, the Abbé says, one takes such queens to the inn; in Paris one respects them when they are beautiful and throws them on the highway when they are dead. People complain of everything with great fits of laughter, and do the most detestable things while laughing. At the Marchioness of Parolignac's faro table nobody rises to greet them. Candide loses fifty thousand francs in two deals and does not flinch. The servants decide an English lord is in the house. After supper a scholar who has written a hissed tragedy and an unread book says that all goes awry except gay supper: Jansenist against Molinist, Parliament against the Church, men of letters against men of letters. Candide hears another Pangloss. In the boudoir the Marchioness has him pick up her garter, then moves the diamonds from his fingers to her own.

Candide feels remorse. The Abbé, who has taken a light share of the losses, listens to the Venice rendezvous and to a woman never written to, once dead, then found, then lost. The next morning a letter in Cunegonde's name says she is ill in town and cannot fly to his arms. He hurries with gold and diamonds. A maid says the light hurts her. A plump hand comes from the bed. He fills it with diamonds and leaves a bag of gold on the chair. An officer arrives with the Abbé and a file of soldiers. Travellers are not treated thus in El Dorado, says Candide. Martin is more a Manichean than ever. Three small diamonds, each worth about three thousand pistoles, turn the officer into the most honest man in the world. There are orders for arresting all foreigners, he says, because a beggar heard foolish things and was moved to parricide. The officer will take them only as far as lower Normandy. A Dutch ship at Dieppe is bound for Portsmouth. It is not the way to Venice. Candide thinks he has made his way out of hell.